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elationship
stand in the face of the frustration and
anger of our children sometimes. We
need to be able to say ‘no’ but remain
connected in our love. It is important so
that our children learn to be able to deal
with the adversity and the inevitable
suffering that life is about. I sometimes
flinch when I see children running the
life of the parents and being completely
intimidated by the child’s tantrums.
Usually the parents start to resent the
child, their libido becomes diminished
because sometimes there is no time for
the relationship of the parents. Even
though they do everything for the child,
the child feels more and more disconnected
and later on in school does not
know how to cooperate with their peers
because they have been conditioned to
be little dictators.
It is important for us as parents to
know our own unconscious conditioning
and what we received from our parents,
so that we can be responsible for
the behaviour, attitudes, communication
and love that we pass on to our children.
We cannot escape conditioning; it is part
of human development. But we can
become aware of the way our ego was
formed.
The ego can be seen as the interaction
between the two ‘conditioned’ aspects of
self, the emotional self and the intellectual
self. Most people‘s emotional self
has not matured, so we could call the
emotional self the emotional child.
Many people do not experience
themselves as equal to others. They are
most of the time engaged in some kind
of power struggle with others, feeling
like victims, blaming the politicians, the
system, their parents, their lovers and
ex-lovers, God, etc. The emotional child
represents all our different feelings and
emotions. Sometimes it acts rebellious,
sometimes submissive. The intellectual
self is our ability to compare, conceptualise,
discriminate, be critical, judge,
make meaning, etc.
It is interesting to observe the dynamic
between these two aspects of the self.
The emotional child might say, ‘Oh, I
would like to go to the beach today!’ and
the intellect might say, ‘Well you have
been to the beach already, yesterday and
there is a lot of work to be done and
there is no surf anyway!’ The child says,
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‘But I want to and I don’t feel like working
— it’s too hard, it’s too boring, I feel
inadequate, I can’t do it, I just want to go
to the beach!’ The intellect might cave in
and collude with the child and say, ‘The
whales are travelling down the coast
and it would be a shame to miss them,
there is always work but the whales are
only there twice a year’, and so we go to
the beach and avoid a particular commitment
and then the intellect comes
back at us criticising us for being lazy,
missing out on income and struggling to
pay the bills, avoiding etc. This is just an
example to illustrate the inner conflict
that goes on and on internally between
our intellect and emotions.
These inner conflicts originate from
repressed and unresolved emotional
trauma or dilemma. We can only react
the way we have been taught or learnt
to react emotionally — like a child.
Whenever we are faced with situations
that are overwhelming and too difficult
When people go on the spiritual
path, they sometimes try to
‘transcend’ this internal conflict.
They may meditate and try to
witness their inner thoughts but
struggle because they have not
dealt with their inner emotional
injury or sense of unloveability.
for us to deal with, our intellect steps in
to ‘think ourselves out of the dilemma’.
We unfortunately disconnect from our
ability to fully feel the experience and go
into automatic, archaic coping mechanisms.
We disconnect from the confluence
of our lives and are unable to meet
the challenge of the ever changing chaos
of life. We become numb to the vitality
of our emotions. Sometimes we don’t
even know what we are feeling. We
lose our ability to read our emotional
experience and get caught in cycles of
emotional reactivity with the intellect
working overtime to try and ‘sort out
the mess’. This is why some people
when asked how they are feeling can
only respond with ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
When people go on the spiritual
path, they sometimes try to ‘transcend’
this internal conflict. They may meditate
and try to witness their inner thoughts
but struggle because they have not dealt
with their inner emotional injury or
sense of unloveability. They use meditation
in that instance as an avoidance
structure. Their minds become tighter
and tighter and more controlled.
I work with clients from the central
perspective of the spiritual self. I believe
everybody has their own particular perspective
on this. I explain it from an existential
perspective and call the spiritual
self our core ‘being’. When we can focus
our awareness on the fact that we ‘exist’,
then we can recognise that we exist
within our body. We can recognise our
breath as it moves in and moves out. We
can experience our body sensations, the
temperature around us, the sounds etc.
We can recognise that we exist within
existence.
Unfortunately, because of the inner
conflict between the emotional child
and the intellect, our awareness is preoccupied
and consumed. The emotions
become exhausted and the intellect
despondent. We focus on what we have
to do (like go to the beach) or what we
need to have. The unresolved conflict
keeps us stuck in being concerned about
the past or the future and we lack the
ability to truly be present to our lives.
We can resolve this internal conflict
by finding emotional healing for the
inner child and create a more benevolent
intellect, by cognition of what behaviours
we learnt in our childhoods, who
we learnt them from, how we adopted
or rebelled against them and how this
learnt behaviour impacts on our lives
today. This way the intellect is able
to recognise and support the different
nuances of our emotional experiences.
Once these internal conflicts are
healed, then our spirit can truly descend.
We can bring the light into every moment
of our human experiences and find deep
understanding for the children our parents
once were. Out of this understanding
arises forgiveness, acceptance, compassion
and love, for oneself and others.
We need to uncover the qualities of
our ancestors, our ‘karmic’ legacy, to
be able to understand ourselves and to
begin to learn to find self forgiveness,
self compassion and self love. Then we
can extend this to the rest of the world
— especially our children.
Volker Krohn has been the director of the Hoffman
Institute Australia since 1992 and facilitates
the Hoffman Process, an eight-day residential
program that focuses on family-of-origin issues
imbedded in a spiritual framework. He is a clinical
member of the Victorian Association of Family
Therapy and has a post-graduate degree in Self-
Psychology. He and his wife Jeanette have three
children who are all adult now (plus one grandson!).
He has been step-parenting these children
for the last 18 years. Contact the Hoffman Centre
Australia at 1800 674 312 or visit www.quadrinity.com.au
for further information.